Dr. Evers, Hoover Institution (PDF)
Testimony
On Kansas House Bill 2621
Submitted by Williamson M. Evers
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
February, 2014
There is no reason in principle, if a state like Kansas wanted to go beyond the Common Core, why Kansas couldn’t create better standards than Common Core and have them certified by Kansas’s colleges and universities. A quick but careful fix could be done by taking Kansas’s old standards and one of the high-quality old state-level standards (like those of Massachusetts, Indiana, or California) and blend them. Massachusetts’s standards are not under copyright, and California readily grants permission for use for non-profit purposes.
Kansas House Bill 2621 addresses these concerns. It repeals adoption of the Common Core national standards and the Kansas supplements to these standards. The bill provides for the creation of a Kansas state standards commission that would write recommended curriculum-content standards for Kansas. Wisely, the commission is to include professors from the departments of math and English at four-year Kansas colleges or universities.
Kansans Against Common Core 